Homework questions for Tuesday

1. How does Keats describe Porphyro in stanza IX?

2. What does he want 'saints' do to and how is this different to what Madeline desires on The Eve of St. Agnes?

3. Why does Porphyro hide on arrival?

John Keats Biography

• John Keats was born in Finsbury Pavement near London in 1795.
• When John was eight years old, his father was killed in an accident.
• In 1810 his mother died of consumption, leaving the children to their grandmother.
• The grandmother put them under the care of two guardians, to whom she made over a respectable amount of money for the benefit of the orphans.
• Under the authority of the guardians, he was taken from school to be an apprentice to a surgeon.
• In 1814 John became a hospital student in London.
• Under the guidance of his friend Cowden Clarke he devoted himself increasingly to literature.
• In 1814 Keats finally sacrificed his medical ambitions to a literary life.
• In May 1816, Hunt helped him publish his first poem in a magazine.
• In 1817 he went on a hiking tour to Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Brown.
• The first signs of his own fatal disease – consumption - forced him to return prematurely.
• In London, he moved to Hampstead Heath, where he lived in the house of Charles Brown.
• Despite his illness and his financial difficulties, Keats wrote a tremendous amount of great poetry during 1819, including "La Belle Dame sans Merci" ("The Beautiful Lady without Pity")
• He wrote the poem on April 21, 1819. It appears in the course of a letter to his brother George.
• Shortly before the poem was written, Keats recorded a dream in which he met a beautiful woman in a magic place which turned out to be filled with pallid, enslaved lovers.
• In 1820 an unmistakeable sign of consumption marked the beginning of what he called his "posthumous life".
• In the late summer of 1820, Keats was ordered by his doctors to avoid the English winter and move to Italy.
• John Keats died in Rome on the 23rd of February, 1821.
• He is buried on the Protestant Cemetery with the following lines engraved on his tombstone: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

Tragic Heroes/Heroines

Following up from today's lesson...

Simply put, the tragic hero/heroine is the main character (protagonist) in a tragedy. In Aristotelian beliefs about tragedy it was imperative that the tragic hero/heroine was a person of nobility; a member of the aristocracy to make their tragic downfall more poignant and to ensure that an audience watching a play could be readily instructed not to repeat their mistakes.

However, in Streetcar Williams presents us with a tragic heroine in Blanche, who is ordinary; a 'human' tragic heroine. We get the sense that in the genre of domestic American tragedy Williams is at pains to emphasise Blanche's humanity; she is not the same type of heroine you might expect in an epic/classic tragedy. Rather, Williams arguably shares Arthur Miller's belief that the 'tragedy of the common man' (or woman if we are thinking about Blanche) is just as valid as the tragedies experienced by the characters in Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth for example. By emphasising the ordinariness of Blanche if you like, Williams stresses that all people have the capacity to experience extremely tragic circumstances and throughout the play we see Blanche attempt to, as Miller writes, "gain [her] rightful position in [her] society."

--Re-read Arthur Miller's work on 'Tragedy and the Common Man." Any questions? Ask me on Thursday.